The Watch Soul
by LS of ACO
Summary: Most souls are like lumps of coal, fit only for burning. Some are like diamonds, hard, strong, and beautiful if you put work into them. A rare few are like living coral, ever growing and expanding. In all the world, there are only two souls like watches.
1. 1 Not bored, just lonely

It was midnight: another new year. In the distance, across the water and above the shining city, the soft shuddering bass of old-fashioned chemical fireworks was audible even to normal ears. Their glow was mostly lost in the distant city's own glow, and in the rainbow light of the Christmas lights still haphazardly struck along the railing at the edge of the water, but every once in a while, when a particularly large one went off and the dull boom could have almost been mistaken for more destructive kind of explosive, the water in the fountain would glow a little more gold or a little more green than normal. The antique fireworks, their light and noise, made him smile; he'd always liked them, and not many places used genuine chemical fireworks anymore. That New Salem still did after all these years was a pleasant surprise. Every new year he expected them to have gone virtual, but apparently someone in the city council was as nostalgic for the real thing as he was. Just one more reason why this had been an excellent choice for a spot to wait.

He sighed and leaned back until he was lying flat, balancing himself on the edge of the granite fountain, his shoulder-length black hair almost touching the water below. He looked up at the sky and grinned, and began snapping his fingers slowly, each crack louder than the last until it sounded like the bones in his fingers must be breaking.

He'd come to like the city, over the course of his many yearly visits, as well as the sleepy little town on this side of the water, the one which had put up the little rainbow lights. It reminded him of his childhood in old New York, in many ways; and although he told himself that it was the old-fashioned feel of the city, with its dangling traffic lights that could have come right out of the 20th century, he knew that what really triggered his nostalgia was the feeling he got when, every year, no matter which far corner of the world he'd spent the last year in, he saw this same view, heard these same fireworks, and sat on this same fountain; the feeling of being home. After all, it was the closest thing to a home he'd had since New York, the only constant in his life for so many years of traveling the world, picking up languages like diseases, and living as a millionaire, a salesman, a doctor, a teacher... And when the night passed, as it did every year, without any sign of what he was waiting for, he would sigh, rise and stretch, and turn his back on the city and the fountain, walk back through the sleepy little town to some other distant land, and spend another year as another man.

But not this year.

His smile grew wider as he listened to the footsteps so artfully concealing themselves in his rhythmic snapping. Abruptly he stopped the snapping; no step fell. He laughed and shook his head, long hair waving a bit; she was still pretty good. Still not good enough, of course, but definitely pretty good.

"There's really no need for sneaking" he called out into the night with a grin. "I thought all that was behind us." He heard a soft, annoyed sigh, and his grin grew wider.

"You really came," she said, after a moment of silence. There was disbelief in her voice.

"Of course I did," he said cheerfully. "And so did you." There was a short pause. "Well don't stand over there in the shadows like an Agent, come sit with me," he said, patting the cold stone beside him. There was no sound of approaching footsteps. "Oh come on, what am I going to do, _kill_ you?" He snorted. "Not likely." After another moment, he heard her taking slow steps towards the fountain. Satisfied, he leaned back again, and resumed watching the stars.

She paused when she entered the glow of the little Christmas lights, and he sat up to look at her, still leaning back on his hands – his fifth best playboy pose. There was an odd look on her face, an odd mix of emotions; he immediately began unraveling the tangle, decoding her face like a cipher. People were exceedingly complex systems, but systems they remained, and he had a great deal of practice with human systems in general. And even, come to that, with hers in particular. He saw the disbelief there, the horror and disgust, the nostalgia, the fear (subconscious of course, but no creature has ever forgotten how to fear), shame, puzzlement, that minute iota of attraction that had always been there… "You really waited," she said disbelievingly – almost accusingly. Yes, it was an accusation, he realized. There it was: resentment. Not for the things he'd done back then, before their last meeting, but for what he'd been doing since. _How dare you,_ her eyes seemed to say. _How dare you, of all people, keep your word to me?_ "All these years, you came and waited."

"And all these years, you remembered," he said, smirking at her. Anger and shame both flared in her expression – still such an easy mark after all this time. "Not that you should feel bad about it," he said airily, lying back over the water again. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. I _am_ very memorable." She scoffed at that, but it had the desired effect; he felt her sit down – ramrod straight of course, no relaxation for her – on the fountain next to him, an arm's length away.

"So," he said after another moment of silence during which he traced every visible constellation, "I gather that you didn't expect me to actually be here?" She shifted slightly before answering.

"Not really. I'd always thought you were joking. You know, just another dumb thing you said. I almost never even thought about it." He felt her turn towards him, and sat up again. They made eye contact for the first time in several lifetimes. "_Every_ year?" she asked in that tone of disbelieving accusation. "You really came and sat on this stupid fountain _every year_ since 2021? You? _You_ really did that?"

"Yep," he said cheerfully.

She examined him for a moment, then snorted and turned away, looking down at the pavement. "Must've missed a hell of a lot of New Years' parties," she muttered.

"Oh, tons," he said, waving his hand at the Christmas lights, as if each one represented a New Years' party. "Why, I've given up so much free alcohol for you, I could've opened a liquor store by now if I hadn't made that promise. Or if I'd been so _dishonorable_ as to go back on my word." He paused briefly, in mock contemplation. "It still wouldn't have been enough to get me drunk, of course. Or you, for that matter. That's why I brought Rohypnol instead."

"Oh shut up, Sylar," she snapped. It took all his talents to detect the note of laughter in her voice; she suppressed it well, but not completely.

"Soooo," he said, leaning over to put an arm around her only to have her immediately shrug it off and slide even further away from him, "how's your day been?" She gave him no answer, and glared daggers at the ground.

"You knooooow, "he said slowly, sucking on the word as if it contained vital nutrients, "I remember a conversation we had a long time ago. It kind of reminds me of this one, and not just because you contributed so much to both." Her stony silence was unfazed by that jab. "It was just after I'd killed you for the, hmm…was it the third time? Oh well, not important. I recall telling you that eventually, what with us being the only two immortals on Earth, you'd get bored and come to forgive me. I recall," he said, eyes glinting as he matched her movement to the right, "that you didn't think that day would ever come."

"I'm not here because I'm bored, Sylar, "she snapped. "Or because I've forgiven you."

"Then why _are_ you here?" he asked. "Especially if you didn't honestly think I would be." Then, sooner than he'd expected, she let out a sigh of defeat, and slumped forward, the tone of righteous offense draining out of her voice as if she had been punctured.

"I'm not bored," she insisted again. "I'm just…I don't know, lonely, I guess." He nodded sagely and put his arm around her again. She did not shrug it off this time, though she did grimace. "It's harder for me than it is for you. I was 18 when my ability kicked in, so that's how old I look. My face isn't fully developed. No one's going to believe me if I say I'm older than 23 or 24, and they expect my face to change. You're older, you have a wider range. People can pull of that late-20s look until they're 60 these days. You could stay in the same place for 15 or 20 years before anyone said anything about you not aging." He grinned.

"Told ya it would be hard."

There was another long pause.

"I didn't, though," he said suddenly, the glibness draining out of his voice as suddenly as the contempt had from hers. She glanced at him in surprise. "Stay in one place for a long time, I mean," he said in clarification. "I moved. Every year, actually, on the new year. That was the system. One year, one place. Well, two, if you count this place, but this is only one night a year."

"Why?" she asked, the note of horror in her voice reminding him of old times. He shrugged.

"Why not? My abilities – mine and yours, specifically – give depth of understanding. Mine directly, and yours through immorality, but they both give it. When you have the innate ability to understand things, and forever to think about them, you're going to understand them about as completely as they can be understood. So with depth as a given, I decided I'd reach for breadth. You know, travel. I've had a name a year, a job a year, a culture a year. I've tried to experience everything this little rock has to offer."

"Everything except meaningful human relationships, huh?" she said darkly, looking away from him again. "Those didn't strike you as being important?"

"Oh, it's not that," he said, the glibness returning as strong as ever. "It's just that that's another thing that, with us having our abilities, is a given, after I wait long enough."

Now she did shrug his arm off, and move away from him again. "I didn't come here because we're friends," she said viciously. "We're not."

"Oh, I know," he said. "You came here because you're lonely, like you said. You're tired of never seeing the same faces. You're tired of lying to everyone. You're tired of never _trusting_ anyone. And as much as you hate to admit it to yourself, you know you can trust me more than anyone else in the world."

"Trust you to still be a monster after all this time," she spat. He shrugged again.

"If that's what you want to call me. I don't deny I've made the occasional kill since we last spoke. But I would bet my immortality," he said, moving closer to her and slipping his arm around her yet again, "that you have too." She neither answered nor shrugged him off again. She was silent for a moment, then sighed. "Oh, and you don't even deny it! Well, that's progress. The righteous little Claire I remember would never have admitted to doing anything _wrong_, especially not to a _monster._ Unless…" he leaned over to whisper in her ear "you don't even think it's wrong anymore."

Now she did shrug him off, and move away yet again. He looked at her for a long moment, still positioned to whisper in her escaped ear. "You know," he said eventually, "if you keep doing that, the fireworks are going to end up behind us." And now suddenly she did laugh, long and loud.

"Alright, sure, why the hell not, Sylar?" she said, still laughing as she spoke. "Fine. You waited for me, and I came, so I guess this is what we both deserve, you know?"

"The wisdom of age suits you," he said with mock solemnity, as she moved around to sit on the other side of him, closer to where she had been before her repeated moves away from him.

"Yeah, well, it better," she said. "It's not going anywhere." He nodded, and they sat in silence again for a moment, watching the fireworks of New Salem. "It suits you well too," she said eventually. "Being older, I mean. You seem less…" she trailed off.

"Sylary?" he suggested.

She snorted. "Hmph. Maybe." She looked at him again, this time simply examining him. "I don't think so, though. You're still _definitely_ you. As much as I hate to say it, I probably wouldn't be talking to you if you weren't." She sighed and looked down at the pavement again.

"That can be a hard thing to realize about yourself," he said slowly. "That the familiar always draws you, even when you think you despise it. It's funny; I work against that impulse in myself, but I was relying on it to bring you here."

"Why _did_ you wait?" she asked, almost seeming to address the world at large rather than the man beside her.

"I asked you earlier how you day had been," he said in lieu of answering her. "I was joking, but I really would like to know: what have you been up to all these years?" She shrugged.

"Sort of like you, I guess. Lots of travel. Not a new place every year, and not a new life either…I've kept contact with the same friends for 10 years sometimes, just not letting them see my face after a while. I haven't really accomplished anything important since the team disbanded." She laughed. "It seems so unimpressive, when I look at it like that. I think I lived more the first 20 years of my life than I have in all the time since." She paused a moment, and then said quietly "Sometimes I feel like I haven't really been living at all."

"Maybe you haven't," he replied. "I've always thought I wasn't living for the first part of my life." She shook her head.

"So what am I supposed to do, start killing people?"

"You've stopped?"

"You know what I mean," she said through gritted teeth. "I never _slaughtered_ people. I never _enjoyed_ it. I did my job."

"Oh sure," he said laughing, "You did your job. But you also enjoyed it. Don't try to tell me you didn't. Remember, Claire, I've been inside that pretty little head of yours. I know what makes you tick. That was a long time ago, but some things about people don't change."

"Yeah? Well maybe those things do change, if they live for 150 years. And maybe you don't always know everything."

"And I also notice," he went on, "that you don't insist that you've stopped killing. It's been a long time since that was your job." She made no reply to that.

After another moment of stargazing, he spoke again. "So, did you keep in touch with anyone else from the old days? After the team broke up, I mean. I'm _pretty_ sure I remember seeing you with a few of the old faces during your _foxhunting _days." She waited a few seconds before answering, and when she did, there was a dullness in her voice, and a twinge of despair.

"Peter, for a while. 20 years or so."

"Oh ho ho, really? And here I'd written off little Pete. Tell me, did he _ever _find some kind of track for his life?" She laughed, still dully.

"Not really. His abilities stayed unstable too. But we both kept working for the agency even after what happened. I believed in what we were doing back then, so of course I would have. But Peter…I've never known why he stayed. I think it may have been for me. But he just got…tired, after a while. Just _weary_, you know? Worn. Like everything was draining away from him."

She fell silent, and though she was staring at the ground and he at the stars, he could feel her eyes go far away. He considered diverting her, but decided against it; better to let her confide in him.

"I think he was in love with me," she finally said quietly. "I never said anything though."

"He probably was," he said. Another long silence. "What happened to him?" he finally asked.

"He died," she said softly.

He nodded slowly. "A lot of people seem to do that."

"Yeah." Then she seemed to gather herself. "Okay, yeah. Keeping in touch. I kept in touch with Hiro for a while too. Not that often, but I'd see him around." She laughed. "He probably just decided to visit me one day, and jumped to a bunch of different years. I mean, he almost always looked the same. Almost. Maybe it was like two days." She laughed again, and shook her head. He laughed too.

"Ahh, the mastery of time and space. The one ability I could never steal."

"That and persuasion."

"You've been reading some very old files," he said accusingly. "I was still a novice then."

She snorted. "And transmutation."

"Well, that wasn't really fair. The kid _literally_ turned to stone. And I probably still would have gotten it eventually if you and Ralph hadn't chosen that exact moment to come barging in."

"And then there was that old lady in Mongolia who could tell the future in songs."

"I've always preferred visual prophecy to acoustic prophecy."

"And projection healing."

"Alright, alright, the point is I could never figure out how to do what he did."

"Why couldn't you anyway? You had every other ability on the squad, after you learned how to get them without cutting heads open."

"You know, I've finally figured that out. He learned to keep his mind just a fraction of a second out of synch with the rest of time, just a little bit in the future. It made it impossible for me to get a read on him, figure out how it worked. It probably gave him faster reflexes too. That would explain how he got so good with that sword."

She laughed. "Maybe. He never told any of us how he did it. It probably was something like that."

"I really wish he hadn't though," he said wistfully. "That would have been a great one to have. To preserve, you know? Think what someone immortal could do with that! It would make things a lot more interesting now, that's for sure."

She looked at him for a moment. "You know," she said quietly, "as much as I hate to say this to you, you're right. Hiro did a lot while he could, but there's just so much people could learn with that." A long silence followed. Then suddenly, Sylar spoke.

"_Wellll_…" he said as he swung his gaze towards her suddenly. Their eyes met again. "As long as you _agree… _I have a secret to tell you."

Her eyes widened. "You son of a bitch," she said. He laughed. "You have it?" He nodded. "How?"

"He gave it to me. Right before he died. Popped up out of nowhere, said he had been watching me, and basically decided that I wasn't evil anymore and that there should be someone left in the world who could do what he did."

She laughed again, in astonishment and disbelief. Then her eyes narrowed, and she suddenly stood, took a step away from him, and pointed at him accusingly. "You didn't wait at all, did you? You've just been teleporting to every New Year's midnight. How long has it really been for you?"

His face fell, and he tilted his head at her. "Claire, I didn't cheat. It's been as long for me as it's been for you. And I walked here a few hours ago. I came down that road."

She just looked at him.

"Here," he said suddenly, jumping to his feet. She didn't take a step away, but he felt her feel the impulse. "I'll show you." He held out his hand to her. She eyed it.

"You'll what?"

"I'll show you. I'll prove it to you. That I kept my promise. I wouldn't want you thinking I'd been dishonest with you." He grinned like a maniac.

Her gaze moved from his hand to his eyes, then back to his hand. "Why," she said softly. There was nothing in her voice to make it a question. When it had been a question earlier, he'd ignored it. Now that it wasn't one, he treated it as one.

"I was wondering when you were going to ask that," he said cheerfully, hand still outstretched. "Why do I want to show you? So you'll believe me. So you'll know that the monster is the only one who's ever kept a promise to you. And besides, I was going to offer to take you a few places anyway. Show you around, you know. Maybe find something interesting." He took a step towards her, and spoke more quietly. "Why did I wait? Because I knew you'd come."

She was looking in the direction of his hand, but not really at it. She spokes towards him, but not really to him. "If I go with you, I'm at your mercy," she said. "You could take me anywhere, anytime, put me in any situation. I could never get away if you didn't want to let me go."

"Claire," he said gently, "you're at my mercy right now. I could stop time right now and take you anywhere, whether you wanted to go or not. You've always been at my mercy. I could have come to you years ago, like I did before." He gave a wan smile. "This whole planet's at my mercy, really. It has been for more than a century. This whole world, this whole universe. And I've only ever killed a few hundred people. When you look at the record for gods among men, I think I've shown more restraint than the average."

"I didn't come to you, Claire, not this time. This time you came to me. And this time I'm giving you a choice. Come with me, and I'll prove you can trust me. I'll prove I kept that promise. That all these years, while you were off searching for meaning, for something that mattered, my life was structured around a promise I made to you. And then, I'll show you the most amazing things you've ever seen. I've been planning this for a long time. I've got some great ideas." His smile was predatory, but she didn't feel like prey; she felt like a stone. The smile didn't touch her. It didn't seem to be for her. How could it be? That wouldn't make sense. Nothing ate stones.

"Or you can go. Live another century, lose a few more people who never really cared about you anyway. You'll just come back. And I'll still be here, because the promise still stands. It's really just a matter of time. Now or later. Take your pick. Are you ready yet, or not?"

She stood perfectly still for a moment. Then, slowly, she reached out and took his hand. The motion seemed to change her, revitalize her. She broke out in the fearless grin she'd worn when they'd known each other so long ago. "Alright," she said. "Alright. Prove it."

He grinned and squeezed her hand, then closed his eyes. The teleportation felt like diving headfirst into icy water.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note: Before we go any further, I should probably note that although this is (obviously) not yet a crossover, it will eventually become one if I maintain the will to write it for about ten more chapters. We'll cross that bridge when and if we come to it though, and getting that far into a story would be unprecedented for me (which is why this isn't posted in crossovers) just though I should make note of that. Hope you liked it, please review.<strong>


	2. Looking

They travelled. Why not? She had nothing better to do, and it was what he'd been doing all along. Except, of course, that they went faster than he had.

It quickly became apparent that everything he'd said was true. From rooftops they watched a hundred Sylars in a hundred years walk down the small town road, recline on the stone fountain, and watch the fireworks; and, finally, one Claire come sit beside one of them.

"I have to admit," he whispered in her ear as she watched herself, "you _are_ very good at sneaking. It probably would have taken me twice as long to realize you were there if I didn't have super hearing. You might almost have gotten the jump on me." She stuck out her tongue at him.

"I've gotten the jump on you plenty of times," she whispered back. "Like in Hong Kong."

"That wasn't fair," he said. "I was still getting used to that old man's magnetoception. It was playing havoc on my hearing. And by the way, you'll recall that I'm the one who killed you in that little encounter, despite your getting the jump on me."

"How did you do that anyway? I just remember waking up."

"Well," he said with a grin, "I suppose there's no harm in telling you now. Let's take this conversation somewhere else first, though. It wouldn't do to overhear ourselves."

He reached out and grasped her arm, and the next moment Claire found she was no longer sitting on the edge of a building in a small town across the water from New Salem, but on the edge of deep canyon.

"Wow, okay," she said. She felt disoriented, cold and slightly numb, from the teleportation and sudden change of scenery. "Yeah." She took a breath, and looked around herself. "Is this the Grand Canyon?" she asked, almost accusingly.

Sylar seemed perfectly at ease with his feet dangling over the edge. He smirked at her. "So," he said "about Hong Kong." He leaned close and whispered into her ear. "You didn't get the jump on me at all. I smelled you coming."

She snorted, and leaned away. "You did not."

"Yes I did," he said indignantly. "I'd gotten that one two weeks ago, in Perth. Healers smell different. Not like other people. I was sitting in that room, smelled a healer, and set a trap for you."

She scoffed. "You're just making that up," she said. "You never had a smelling ability. We had files on you, remember?"

"Oh, please. As if I could be described in _files._ I bet you never knew half of what I could do."

* * *

><p>They watched an aging Hiro startle a bored-looking Sylar in a monk's robes, watched as the two of them talked, and as Sylar laid his hands on Hiro's head and copied his ability. "A monk?" she whispered, suppressing a hysterical giggle. "<em>You<em> were a monk? How does that even work?"

"Well," he replied with a smirk, "I'm pretty good with vows." She blushed, and he smirked wider.

* * *

><p>They went to a few other years, but after 2082, the year he'd taught fifth grade in Indonesia, she told him to go somewhere new.<p>

"I believe you, okay?" she said, affecting petulance to cover her embarrassment.

"You believe me what?" he asked, grinning.

"That you waited. That you lived all those lives. That you kept your damn promise, alright? I believe you. Now let's go somewhere we don't have to hide in the shadows. Let's go _do_ something."

"Like what?"

She paused, as if the question had never occurred to her.

"Ah well, I'm sure we'll find something," he said glibly, grasping her arm. She smiled through the cringe this provoked.

"You did say you had some-" he teleported.

"Ideas?" he asked on the other side, while she was still feeling frozen from the trip. "I have a few, yes." He reached over and tilted her chin up toward the sky. She saw that it was night where he'd taken them. She looked at the stars for a few seconds before the realization hit her.

"What, space? We're going to outer space?"

"Of course," he said grandly. "Like I said, I've experienced just about everything this little rock has to offer. Time to try some other little rocks." He looked at her pityingly. "Surely you didn't think that the human race would just sit here forever, did you? After long enough, everyone goes looking for something better. Or even just something different."

"I know the feeling," she muttered.


	3. Lord and Master

He strode through the crowd as if he owned it, and in a way he did. Or he could have if he'd wanted to, which was the same thing. The crowd was a system, people flowing through a street. And through the people flowed Sylar. He was not part of the crowd, any more than the crowd was a part of the street. But it was his natural habitat, his hunting ground. He moved through it with an effortless ease never equaled by any pickpocket, and barely surpassed by ghosts. Something in him, not just in the way he moved, but in the way he stood, the way he breathed, the way he _was, _let him pass through, meeting no resistance, like a drop of oil rising through water.

She had somewhat more trouble. She was almost running to keep up with him, dodging around people constantly, and occasionally resorting to pushing. Poor girl. Going on 150, and still completely clueless. She couldn't see the system. He wondered what that was like, to look at a crowd, or a watch, or a game, and not understand it. He had some difficulty doing so. These things were so…stark. So crisp and clear. He thought the closest he'd come to feeling what other people felt when they looked at a system like that was the feeling he got when he looked up at stars. Now _that_ was a complex system.

People used to say, rather egocentrically, that the human brain was the most complex structure, the most complex system, in existence. Sylar knew that brains, even ordinary, average brains, were indeed immensely complex; they'd been his main area of interest for almost a century. But slowly, as he found more and more similarities between them, and his gift of understanding began to put the pieces together, the need to understand became less frantic, less all-consuming. He would get there, he now knew. There were plans in place. Even now, walking through the crowd with Claire, the plans were in action.

So he'd begun to turn his attention elsewhere, to the next great challenge, the next great system, the system he'd spent one night a year for the last century staring into: the stars. Space. The final frontier? Probably not, but it would do for now. Until he found a better one, a bigger one. He wondered which was truly infinite: the universe, or his own hunger for understanding. He'd understand that too one day, with a bit of luck. And with a bit more, maybe she would one day be able to keep up with him in a crowd. Maybe one day she'd even understand the shape of his plan. He smirked at the thought.

He'd been planning this for a long time, this final step on the path to understanding the system of the human mind, the challenge that had driven him since his ability had awoken, and also the first step on the path to understanding the universe itself. In some ways he'd been planning this since he first looked inside her mind and saw, for lack of a better term, the structure of her soul.

Most people's souls were like lumps of coal: the only interesting thing, the only useful thing, they could do was burn. He'd used their fire to forge himself, used the energy of their souls to fuel his internal empire. He had further plans for this kind of person; they were useful, if boring.

Much rarer were the people with souls like diamonds. There was a beauty to their systems, a precision of structure that gave them strength. With the careful application of overwhelming force, and a bit of a knack for such things, they could be shaped by cutting into something even more beautiful. He'd found, cut, worn, and worn out a few such people in his life, starting with Elle.

But they could never grow, could never be expanded upon. Every time their diamond souls were cut, they grew smaller, lesser. He couldn't shape them to his desire without breaking them, shattering them, making them less than whole, even if only a little less than whole. And try as he might, he could never be content with that. It felt like cheating, because the product wasn't everything that it appeared to be. The system was incomplete. It didn't run properly. There were hiccups, stalls. These cut people couldn't manage themselves anymore. He'd begun to believe that, imperfect as their self-systems were, they could not be improved upon without incorporating them into a larger system; once cut, they were no longer self-contained, no longer true systems at all, just extensions of his own system, parasites.

And Sylar despised parasites.

Because it wasn't enough to simply understand the systems, not really. Understanding was the animal drive, the hunger. But the true human desire was not merely to understand, but to use that understanding to repair, to improve, to perfect. Like designing the perfect watch. It went without saying that, once he understood something, he would make it better, just like he'd made himself better. That was what he did.

The people with souls of coal were made better by burning. That was their place, their role. The diamonds…well, he'd begun to give them up as a lost cause, at least in their natural form. One day, if the plan went well, he would be able to replicate the conditions that led to the formation of that kind of person, and forge them himself, whole and perfect; the wild ones, the one's he'd stumbled across, could never really be made perfect, with their fundamental structures flawed as they were.

And then there was Claire. Her turned around to face her, but kept moving through the crowd. He favored her with a lazy grin. Walking through the crowd backwards took a small amount of extra effort, but it was worth it to see her expression. She gave him smirk that didn't quite hide her surprise, with a wry, wistful twinge to it. She thought he was taunting her. And she was right.

Claire's soul was like a piece of living coral. It was beautiful, elegant, arcing, organic, rough, fractal, self-sustaining; delicate, yet indestructible. Perhaps it was part of her ability; he'd never quite understood the distinction people made between themselves and their abilities, so it didn't really matter to him. The point was, she could be shattered, could be cut like the diamonds or even burned like the coal, yet still remain whole. He could shape her, carve her, mold her into any form he desired, any form he could imagine, and she would survive it.

Oh, it would take a long time. He had no doubt of that. But she was so full of despair and self-loathing, and the general world-weariness only a 150-year-old teenager with no meaningful connections to anyone could possess, that it was pitifully easy to manipulate her. To carve pieces out of her soul, move things around in her head. He was shaping her like a bonsai tree, and she didn't have the will to stop him.

That was why he'd waited for her to come to him. Why waste time and effort putting out the spitfire of resistance, of self-preservation, of pride, when it would burn itself out on its own? He'd realized then, when he first looked into her mind and took her ability, that if he just let her live long enough, it would. So he'd done other things. Focused on building other skills. Made plans, including this one.

And he'd been right to do so: a hundred years and more of living, and seeing herself survive death a thousand times over, had dulled her survival instinct until it was almost nonexistent. Her sense of self had been deemed nonessential by a human brain bemused by its own invincibility; why waste space on such a thing, a plan for a building that could never be damaged and so would never need repair, lifeboats for a ship that was unsinkable, when there were new memories of dead friends to store, new self-loathing to catalogue, new nightmares to assemble.

She was an absolute wreck, he thought, watching her wry smile and determined progress after him. But she still held together. Her ability would let her do nothing else. No matter what force struck her, it could never break her, only bend her. She could never die, never grow forgetful in old age, probably never even go truly insane. And unlike him, she lacked the will to break herself out of this mold, to reinvent herself completely when she grew tired and sick at heart. Oh well. He had will enough for two. Or three. Or six billion. Or more.

He would change her, change her so fundamentally that she wouldn't recognize herself. Her sense of self was cracked and broken now; he would grind it to dust, mix it with water to make a paste, and begin to sculpt. He would fire it with the burning souls of lesser humans, then grind it down again, until he got it right.

The coral of her soul would grow, die back, and grow again, all according to his direction. She was already tangibly apathetic about what happened to her, and soon he would prune away all that remained of her defenses.

He would make her the perfect human system. If it took him a million years, he would do it. And then, once he'd finally solved that, finally understood all the diverse possible permutations of the human brain, the most complex structure in the universe…well, then he could really get started.

Coal, diamond, coral. But Sylar did not fit into his own hierarchy. He'd never particularly thought why not; perhaps it was that he didn't really consider himself human, not in the same sense as everyone else. In his own mind, he was the one-man master race, the lone wolf in a world, a universe, of sheep. But if he had been asked about his own soul, where he fit on the hierarchy, he would have said that he had a soul of metal. He had forged himself, made himself, designed himself, constructed himself. His soul was an intricate, perfect, self-maintaining machine. It was like a watch, really.

He took great care to maintain his own soul, the ticking watch at the heart of himself. After all, his was the only watch-soul in the universe, and if it ever ran fast, or slow, or, god forbid, stopped, how would anyone ever know what time it was? He almost felt that time itself would cease to exist, like it came from him, depended on him. Like he'd made it. Like he owned it. And now, with Hiro's ability, he'd decided that yes, he probably did own time, in every sense of the word. And he was halfway to owning space as well. Walking backwards through the crowd, he smiled. His name was Sylar: time's lord and master.

The lordship and mastery of other things, including the little girl still struggling to keep up with him in the crowd-system, would come with time.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Well comrades, as the state of the last two chapters might suggest, the schedule's been pushed up a bit because I got bored of writing mildly sinister Claire/Sylar fluff and decided to give up padding, so current plan is that the crossover (and corresponding move of the story to crossovers) will occur either in the next chapter or the one after that. Five invisible dollars for anyone that can guess who's about to show up (GET IT?).**


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